Colour Negatives vs Colour slides

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timparkin
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Re: Colour Negatives vs Colour slides

Post by timparkin » Sat Oct 29, 2011 5:37 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

For anyone who has shot colour neg but not tried the new Portra 160 and Portra 400 - you haven't experienced what is possible yet. Here is an example shot on Portra 400 which I did almost no post processing too (I'm writing up a fairly fool proof way of inverting colour neg which keeps it's punchiness and overcomes a lot of the colour cast issues).

Image

The following was taken on Portra 160

Image

And the results can be had very easily from an Epson V750 (these were drum scanned but I can do them on an Epson for comparison if anyone is interested).

From my experience, you don't need to filter neg for colour. As for gradding, I'm starting to put grad over a scene occasionally as, although it isn't needed, it can improve the tonality if you want to darken the sky a lot in post processing. If you are happy with your skies to look naturally light then no need at all. In general, I would use a 1.5 stops less grad than needed for tranny - hence for most shots it probably isn't necessary but when you have a continuos tone sky that is very bright (sunset on a fairly cloudless day) then I think a grad can help - I use a soft instead of a hard generally too to preserve the transition across the horizon.

Tim
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Valerio Trigari
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Re: Colour Negatives vs Colour slides

Post by Valerio Trigari » Wed Nov 02, 2011 1:44 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

I really like the colours in your shots Tim, I think I will need to give it a go to Kodak Portra as well as Ektar. Though I've seen the prices and they are not cheap at all!... :?
http://www.valeriotrigariphotography.com/

Proud owner of a Linhof Technikardan 45.

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